It has been proposed heretofore to employ apparatus commonly called an "ink jet" for the delivery of deblocking reagents in solid state oligomeric reactions. Such proposal, however, is crude, is limited in scope, and generally requires non-automatable procedures for its employment. Thus, it has been proposed to use an "ink jet" apparatus to place droplets of a deblocking reagent, zinc bromide, upon specified locations of a reaction surface to deblock a growing oligonucleotide chain to render it amenable to chain elongation. This has been proposed for use, for example, on a microscope slide. Following the delivery of deblocking reagent, it was proposed to manipulate the microscope slide such as by dipping it into a quantity of further reagent to accomplish a chain elongation. Further application of the "ink jet" delivery of chemical reagent was then proposed, however realignment of the microscope slide would be necessitated by that proposed methodology. In addition to the cumbersome nature of the prior proposal and its lack of suitability to full automation, only relatively small harvests of oligomeric product were anticipated using the proposed scheme.
There is a great need for chemical reaction apparatus, materials and attendant methodologies which permit the automated, high yield, relatively large scale synthesis of chemical species, especially oligomers. The apparatus and methodologies provided by the present invention now enable the use of chemical "jetting" technology for the practical synthesis of chemical and biochemical products in high yield and with ease of synthesis. There is also provided a need for synthetic systems which deliver complex synthesized products to receiving vessels with ease and in high yield.
The apparatus and methods of the present invention also address a long-felt need by permitting the preparation of libraries of chemical compounds having predictable diversity among the functional moieties thereupon.
This invention also diminishes waste stream pollution associate with many prior synthetic technologies through the precision application of reagent moieties in synthetic schemes.
Precisely arrayed pluralities of defined chemical compounds are also possible through employment of this invention. Binding, reaction, degradation, chemical and biological interaction and other testing protocols may, thus, be performed with unparalleled convenience through practice of embodiments of this invention.
The invention minimizes reagent usage such that the impact of toxic, explosive, radioactive, or expensive sensitive materials on syntheses is reduced.